Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have emerged in an environment of stalled multilateral
trade negotiations. Their impact on international trade has been well documented, while scant
attention has been paid to empirical studies exploring their heterogeneity from the point of
view of deep integration. We set out to determine whether deeper RTAs promote trade more
effectively than less ambitious agreements. We generate credible deep integration indicators
using two recently available datasets from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the
World Trade Institute (WTI-DESTA). We then test the effect of deepness on trade using a
gravity model. We treat additive indicators as factor variables and use Multiple
Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to obtain distilled indicators of deep integration in order to
offer new insight and confirm recent deep integration findings. We find that deeper
agreements increase trade more than shallow agreements, irrespective of whether the
provisions they contain are within or beyond the remit of the WTO.
Keywords: Deep integration, gravity model, regional trade agreements, trade liberalization,
international trade.
JEL: F13, F14, F15, F53